To put it mildly, when I read the post from my friend Ovidiu of Guitar Flame it hit a really sour note with me. A “scrapper” is someone (thief, pilferer, plagiarist) who goes to quality sites related to the same subject you are blogging about and stealing your articles for their benefit. They put the article on their site and claim it to be theirs. It is called copyright infringement, which is quite a serious legal offense. Take a minute to read this brief post at Guitar Flame. I know how he feels.

Two times in the recent past I have had articles taken by tiny minded wimps, who are simply put THIEVES. No other term fits it. I call it stealing was the my first experience with this “scrapper” phenomenon and while it upset me, I was not sure how to handle it. Some of my readers had a few good ideas to combat this fraud. The sixth comment by Ovidiu was one viable idea as was advising Google of this issue since it had AddSense adds on it. He also suggested copyscape.com.

At the time I did nothing. Thinking, of course that this was an isolated case. Ha, It happened again and I became really pissed off. This time I took action. Another cool site was recommended. It is called domaintools.com and for a fee you can locate who owns the site and get all of their personal info so you contact them personally and ask them to remove your articles. That is fine and dandy, but without some punishment, they most likely will tap some other folks. No morales.

Since it was free, here is what I did and it worked well, in fact both sites were taken down by Google. This works especially well if there are Ads by Google on the site. Just click the Ads by Google banner itself and it will take you to a page that says Google Advertising Programs at the top left corner of the page. If you scroll down the page a small amount you will see: Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw. If you click on it, a small questionaire opens which says: Tell Google What you Think. Tell them what you think first, then at the end of the survey you will see: Also Report a Violation? Click that one and check “the adds” and submit it. Immediately on the same page another survey opens up regarding the violation type, check the appropriate one ‘the ad appears to be using a trademark/copyright that does not belong to the advertiser’. Click submit and Google will contact you.

Google takes this stuff very seriously. They turn it over to a legal agency who handles copywright issues. You can simply go to the proper Google page without all the hassle by clicking here:How do I report a copyright infringement by an AdSense publisher? They explain in detail how serious this offense is and what actions will be taken. It is very scary to see what can happen to these pikers.

It is a bit of a process to go through in terms of reporting these violations to Google. It was well worth every second of my time. Within a week or so I received a notice from Google that the sites were being watched closely and the plagiarized pages were removed. When I checked the sites out, they were actually gone. I guess if you don’t have any vibe of your own and have to steal content, than there is no reason to have a site.

The thing Guitar Players Center noticed is that it is a small internet. As Ovidiu of Guitar Flame points out in his post, other bloggers we know and read every day have the same problems.

As Guitar Flame says “I think that we join our forces, we might just start a movement here: “Say NO to scraping!” Do something, lets make a statement to scrappers and report them to the authorities. It was well worth my time, even though I was thinking at the beginning of the process, ‘what a pain in the butt to have to go through this every time someone invades my content.’

Bloggers unite, make more suggestions here, we must stamp out plagiarism, most of us work to hard doing research for ideas we come up with or requests from our great readers to allow a thief to casually claim our work for theirs. Thanks for reading this and “Say NO to scrapping”

3 Responses to Guitar Players Center’s “Scrapper” Solutions

Good one, Danny! Thanks for mentioning. The fact is that in the beginning it didn’t bother me too much, I am in this business since a while and I do know how duplicated content can hurt you so, no matter how small the stealing is, it is stealing and we should really fight it. This example of yesterday showed me that it is possible to shut down a site stealing content if we join our forces. Plus that you had your success on your own! Great job!

Hey, Danny. I so happy for you and impressed about how you took care of this–and are educating the rest of us! I think what you wrote “The thing Guitar Players Center noticed is that it is a small internet” is brilliant and kind of touching–but don’t worry. I will never use it without quoting my expert source!

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